Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Reading about the recent censorship of the New York Times online in China in the wake of the report on the personal wealth of Wen Jiabao, China's head, as well as that of his family, I can't help but contrast it to the events of the Arab Spring earlier in the year. There, you have a group of folks who wanted democracy and liberty, albeit sometimes with a cultural Islamic twist, as the recent elections in Egypt demonstrated, and in China you have a country that's willing to censor one of the world's top papers, denying access to it for over 1 billion people, because they're afraid of how a critical report on their leadership will look.